


becoming

by yosef_the_tycoon



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Asexual Natasha Romanov, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Awesome Maria Hill, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Clint Barton Is a Good Bro, Gen, Hobbies, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Lesbian Maria Hill, Maria Hill is a Good Bro, Maria Stark Lives, Minor Maria Hill/Natasha Romanov, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, POV Natasha Romanov, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Red Room (Marvel), i wanna live in New York bro, minimalism sucks, we stan therapy in this house
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28517136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yosef_the_tycoon/pseuds/yosef_the_tycoon
Summary: With Natalya left behind in Russia, Natasha is learning the intricacies of being human.OrClint is a dumbass, Maria is maybe a little bit in love, and Natasha just wants a new apartment
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Maria Hill & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	becoming

**Author's Note:**

> it's 2:45 am wat am i doing
> 
> lil study of natasha's early days at shield ft liho, maria, and apartment hunting
> 
> brief tw for mentions of past sexual assault, and then nightmares/flashbacks, so read with caution

Natasha receives her own quarters 7 months into her time at SHIELD. It's small, barely more than two rooms, but it's hers.

She knows she's supposed to feel happy, having her own space. She's learning how to be human, after all. At least, she thinks so. Or she's trying. 

But she doesn't know how to be alone. She knows how to sleep in a room full of girls, how to share a flat with a handler, how to exist in a heavily surveiled cell. But she's not used to being alone. Lonely, yes, but not alone. She doesn't know how to just be. Doesn't know how to have a space that's her own. 

It's not like she hasn't spent most of her adult life alone. But it's been with purpose - staying in an apartment complex across from her mark, or 2 blocks away from her fake job. 

So now, she swears she's going crazy. 

Spending too much time with just herself for company - no mission, no nothing - gives her far too much time for introspection. And these days her brain is not a fun place to spend too much time in. 

She says as much to Clint.

She's lying on the couch, watching him burn spaghetti. "I don't like living alone," she announces. 

"Why not?" he says, poking the spaghetti pot apprehensively. 

"Too much time to think." 

"Get a hobby or something," he says, then sighs. "I'm just gonna get takeout." 

He orders Papa Johns, and Natasha thinks. 

A hobby. Noun: an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure.

Physical activity is fine - she trains and works out every day. But she needs things to do when she comes home to her thoughts at night. 

She tries knitting. Turns out she's shit at that, and it just frustrates her. Frustrates Clint, too - she gets yarn inexplicably everywhere. 

She tries embroidery. Too fiddly. So are jigsaw puzzles. And crocheting. Fuck that. 

She tries reading - it's a good distraction, but she gets bored sitting around for too many hours at a time. 

She even tries the lottery. And fucking whittling. Nope. 

Bingewatching Netflix shows feels like she's wasting her time. Only plus side is stealing Clint's Netflix, because it pisses him off. Besides, it feels too much like researching how to be human. Apparently research is not how you become a person. 

So instead, most evenings, she finds herself lying with her back to the hardwood floor, looking up at the ceiling lights, and trying to sort through the shit they put in her brain. It's impossible to know what's real and what isn't. She doesn't even know her own name, for fucks sake. There's chunks missing and key memories that have a sort of surreal quality, and things that she knows never happened.

She's sure she's spent hours and hours in a ballet studio, but her feet don't show the damage consistent with that. She can't figure out when she could have possibly gone to Baghdad, or how she knows Portuguese. She definitely went to Madrid, but can't remember a single second of her time there. 

It doesn't help that she can't sleep. 

It's a novel concept, really - she can't seem to force herself to sleep more than four hours at a time. What little sleep she gets is full of ugly bits and pieces that are so vivid they make her nauseous, but she'll probably never be able to verify that they happened.

She gets sick of it. Most nights, she wakes up around four a.m., and she makes her way down to the nearest training room. Splits her knuckles open on a punching bag until the sun rises. 

She has a SHIELD-assigned therapist, Dr Sanders. She's young - clearly very educated, but young. Older than Natasha, but still. Natasha feels at least one thousand years old, most of the time. 

Dr Sanders says lots of things. She tells Natasha that she needs to learn how to feel her feelings. 

Natasha doesn't know how to explain that she thinks she's broken and feels things wrong. 

Like sex, for example. Natasha knows most people enjoy it. She's never had much interest - even the girls in the Red Room enjoyed sex sometimes. For Natasha, it had never been anything but a tool - something functional. 

At least, it had been. 

These days, she can't have sex with men without intense and vomit-inducing flashbacks. It's fucking awful. And it's not like SHIELD sends her on real honeypot missions, but she can't help but think her brain broke and she wishes it hadn't. It's tempting to ask the Doctors who were in charge of her deprogramming if they did something wrong. 

She knows it's not that, though. Viewing herself from the outside, it's so fucking simple. She's just a trauma victim, trying to escape her past, and not knowing quite how to do that. But the version of her that is Natasha is barely seven months old, and every new piece of information about her gets tucked neatly away into a mental file - she doesn't want victim stamped on her forehead.

Natasha is pragmatic. She is, usually. On missions, certainly (she wonders if her brain is wired only to function in life or death situations).

Feelings are a whole other matter. On the inside, nothing makes sense and she thinks that perhaps she is irreparable. There are things that she knows - that she cares for Clint and Maria and Peggy and Coulsdon and Bobbi. She knows that there are bouts of anger that come out of nowhere, and put her crouched on the shower floor, seething. She knows she has flashbacks and panic attacks. She knows that most of the time, when she is alone, she feels like a scared little girl. But there's everything in between, all of this bullshit that doesn't make sense. 

Most SHIELD agents don't live at HQ (plenty do). Maria lives in an apartment uptown. It's nice there, in her apartment. They start hanging out more - Maria says she needs the full New York experience and takes her to dive bars and shitty diners on Friday evenings. Natasha sleeps over, when she can. She doesn't have so many nightmares and Maria makes her feel scarily safe. 

Her apartment is a reflection of who she is. There's a military precision to everything, and everything has its place and order. At the same time, she keeps a random collection of mugs in one of the cupboards, and a folded blanket on the back of the couch. She's got a cat-shaped clock above her bed and black-and-white photography in the kitchen.

"Have you lived here long?" Natasha asks. 

She shrugs. "Two years?"

"It's nice," Natasha says, and it feels like small talk, but Natasha's searching for a way to ask her how she did it. How she made this space so Maria. 

Here own apartment feels like a placeholder. A place she keeps her late-night breakdowns and growing Russian literature collection. It's not a home. Natasha doesn't know what a home would even look like, not for her.

"I want a new place," Natasha tells Maria in a lull in conversation. They're at a little burger joint in Queens that Clint swears by. Maria thinks it's too greasy and Natasha decides she doesn't like burgers all that much. 

"Alright. Let's go apartment shopping," she says, then blanches. "For you. Obviously." 

Natasha isn't sure what that was supposed to mean, but doesn't think about it too much. 

They look around apartments all weekend, and Natahs grows more and more frustrated. None of them seem right, and she's ready to give up.

On the third weekend, they're looking around Little Ukraine. Natasha is just about ready to give up when they find the perfect place. She falls a little bit in love with it, she thinks. 

High windows, plenty of light, plenty of space. Affordable, and close enough to HQ. There's a gorgeous little balcony that reminds her of Europe, through the place is a little more rustic than that. 

Maria takes her furniture shopping. Natasha has funds tucked away around the globe, but her SHIELD salary is surprisingly high (another incentive, she'll wager). 

Maria tells her not to just consider the aesthetic of the furniture, but to question is she actually likes it. She starts to get the hang of it.

They go into a million little vintage shops and thrift stores, and Natasha starts to associate the whole process with the Maria of it all. She's so steady, so grounded. So good at guiding Natasha as she builds herself, without interfering too much. 

She starts to build a place that could be a home. 

This time last year, Natalya would have created an aesthetic luxury apartment for one. Natasha is different - she fills her apartment with things. Natasha is allowed likes and dislikes.

There are no rules, she decides. If it catches her eyes and she likes it, she gets it. She's careful - she always is - because she knows she could very easily be a hoarder (she finds herself hoarding food, even now). Clutter is claustrophobic and she wants to avoid that. 

Still, it's a little mismatched and perhaps lacking in personal mementos - photos and such. But it's Natasha's. 

The people in the building are so nice, so normal. She gets invited to their bi-weekly potluck, which is more surreal than anything else she's ever faced (and she once fought a gorilla with a jetpack).

The building also has a resident stray - they call her 'Cat', but Natasha takes to calling her Liho (in Slavic mythology, it's a one eyed woman who is the embodiment of misfortune). She likes to sit on Natasha's shoulders while she's reading, and Natasha doesn't mind the company (though she pretends she hates it). 

She comes by almost daily for food, and when Clint finds out he teases her endlessly. Still, Natasha refuses to think of it as 'hers'.

As the months slip by, and she completes missions and trains and maybe learns what love is, she gets to know Natasha Romanoff.

She likes the rain and little coffee shops and old dive bars. Cinnamon and pumpkin spice lattes. She hates minimalism and slow walkers and the New York summer. Hates Chopin and roasted chestnuts.

If this is what it means to be a person, she doesn't mind it so much.

**Author's Note:**

> stay sexy n don't get murdered


End file.
